Echo de menos

I got a little homesick while in and around Santa Fe and Paraná in eastern Argentina because it is frighteningly similar to Missouri. Rolling fields of corn and soy...with some odd ones of rice mixed in as well!

I spent several nights camping while hitching across the center of the country.

Santa Fe and Paraná are roughly sister cities on opposite sides of the Rio Paraná. Although Santa Fe is supposedly more fun and exciting, I prefered Paraná. Santa Fe was flat and pretty boring overall for me. However, Paraná was fantastic. Although almost deserted when I got there in the morning...the entire city eventually makes its way down to la costanera (the waterfront park) by middle afternoon.



The high, terraced hills overlooking the river were splashed with couples, groups of female friends, and kids sliding from one level to the next on cardboard. The sunny Sunday afternoon was punctuated by maté and pot. Maté, a tea-ish drink used like crazy throughout Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay is obvious for the thermos that normally several people out of a group are carrying. Actually, most people have their own maté hand bags, eerily resembling a leather, European man-bag! And pot, which one smells on almost any street in South America, is always evident but impossible to tell the source of. So it was an afternoon of smelling pot somewhere and seeing people fill up their matés time and time again while getting the incredible caffeine kick that the tea produces.